Letters @~Any letters sent to me that aren't marked 'not for publication' @~and which deal with adventure-related matters will be considered @~for inclusion, maybe being edited in the process. ------------------------------------------------------------------ From Steve McLaren, Margate I quite agree with the guy about grouping 4 or 5 people together to play these text adventures, especially the shareware ones. I myself still like to play the odd text adventure but they have to be really good like the standards of Infocom or Level 9 which the Grue has done with The Four Symbols. I still think this is a high standard of homegrown text adventure, everything about this game was excellent. Cannot wait for the Grue's next game, I bet it will be something special. @~I've been playtesting it and it is! You'll love it. ------------------------------------------------------------------ From Phil Darke, Camberley I was interested to hear what you said about Sam and Max. @~I had told Phil by letter that I had given up on it on the 386 @~due to speech break-up. On my 386 the speech broke up which surprised me a little as Day of the Tentacle, which uses the same engine, worked perfectly. However, I just shrugged my shoulders and put it down to the 386. You can imagine my disappointment when I found that the speech also broke up on the 486. U.S. Gold customer support could only suggest a hardware conflict and basically were no help at all. I have tried every possible configuration that I can think of, but all to no avail, which leads me to suspect a problem with the program. I shall get Paul and my friend Roy to try it out and see if they have any success and I would also be very interested to know how you get on. @~I haven't tried again on the 486-66; I hadn't anticipated any @~problems until getting this letter from Phil as I knew several @~people who have played it on a 486-66 without difficulty. This leads me on to a suggestion for SynTax. I know that SynTax is primarily a games magazine but there must be lots of other people like me, not too clever with the technical side of things, but having odd problems which others may have tackled and overcome (or not). So how about a bugs section; not too technical but at least you would know when you get problems that you are not alone? Possibly if a lot of people are having the same problem and we come to the conclusion (as I suspect with Sam and Max) that it is down to sloppy programming, it might just give us some ammunition to throw at the software houses. @~Okay, let's kick off with Sam and Max. Has anyone else on a high @~spec machine had speech break-up on the game, and did they @~manage to sort it out? If so, please give a shout. ------------------------------------------------------------------ From Alex van Kaam, The Netherlands First a reply for James: Dear James, On your last letter in issue 33, very very impressive, I even had to use my English/Dutch dictionary, my answer to it: 'Okay, I can live with that'. On your question in your Underworld 2 review about DR-Watson in Windows, DR-Watson is a program in your Windows directory, it is not installed automatically when you run Windows but you can install it manually like you install a normal program. When you run DR-Watson it will become an icon in the left corner of your screen, now if you run another program that will cause some kind of 'protection error' (it comes on my screen in Dutch so I don't know what will appear on your screen) and a window appears telling you to shut down this application, after closing this window DR-Watson will pop up and you can type in what you were doing when the error happened. Now DR-Watson will make a file in your Windows directory called DRWATSON.LOG, in this file is a full log of what happened to the system and memory and all the other stuff when the crash happened. Print out this log and call the Microsoft technical support line or the technical support line of the program you are running. So DR-Watson is just a program that monitors your system and makes a visual copy of your system when an error occurs. I'll be waiting for the banana so please sent it to: Alex van Kaam Haydnstr 18 5751 ES Deurne Netherlands @~Oh good, that's cleared up what that mysterious program does. @~Could be handy too. ------------------------------------------------------------------ @~And finally, from James himself ... From James Judge, Chidley Cross Dear Sue, Just a small letter to reply to a few of the things that cropped up in last issue's letters page. Firstly to Richard H's defence of software houses and programmers. It is all well and good that CD games now cost far more to produce, but that is still barely a good excuse that they cost in excess of œ60 to buy. And it is not only CD games that cost a lot - look at the price of Doom 2 and Magic Carpet (RRPs of œ50 and œ60 respectively, and that is just the floppy versions!). I know the prices will fall and I will probably end up getting both in the next year as a demo of Magic Carpet has got me really hooked and Doom was shear bliss, so I can't resist more monsters to blow away! But, let us move away from games at the moment, and look at reference CD-ROMs such as Encarta and the new host of CD-ROMs from Dorling Kindersley (The Way Things Work et al). Now, although they look and sound good I doubt very much that they had a budget in excess of œ50,000, let alone œ1mn. I know that Encarta is VERY good and, probably, deserves to be sold at a high price (I don't know the price at the moment) but the Kindersley group are vastly over-priced, especially with one being based on a book and (from what I've heard) only adding sound effects and animations to the overall package. Personally I would prefer to buy a œ25 hardback book that I could cart around with me and make up sound effects as I went along than pay œ80 for a CD that I could only use at home. There must be a sizeable CD buying population out there for people to make games that cost œ1mn to produce - otherwise it would be like flushing a suitcase of the green stuff down the toilet. So, maybe the manufacturers have got the pricing wrong in some cases - I wouldn't mind paying out œ5-œ10 extra for enhanced sound, levels and other such bonuses, but I wouldn't spend out œ70+ on a game or reference package (unless it was blindingly good and would keep me going for years and years). Also I am very cautious in buying games from certain games houses now that I have moved onto the PC. I will happily fork out the money for a game from the stable of EA, Mindscape or a few other companies I trust implicitly. But, when a game bears a US Gold stamp I will think deeply about whether it is worth the bother to get it. I may have just been unlucky, but having three successive US Gold games failing to run to an adequate standard on my machine says something about the way they test games. Also Mongoose has had big problems with US Gold games and I don't think any of our mishaps can be attributed to wonky AUTOEXEC.BATs or CONFIG.SYSs or the irregular piece of hardware. Next to liking the old text adventures. Hate 'em, and anyone who plays them is a boring person who needs a brain transplant ;-) Only joking - I love the suckers. True, not to such an extent as to spend hours pouring over one problem (I am more liable to ask for the solution after an hour's meditation) but you can't beat suspending your disbelief and entering a world where the only boundary is a parser. True, I spend more time playing RPGs and strategies, but there will always be a big place on m HDD for the odd text adventure or six. Now to Jean's point about old games. I agree that there will always be a group of adventures that will retain a special place in an adventurer's heart (the Unnkulian series, Bloodwych and Captive or some of my old faves) but I do feel that there is more than enough room for the newer games on the market to take over the top spot. Call me fickle, but very few games can keep me coming back to them to play them over and over again and even those that do just don't live up to today's standard of game. Personally I am shocked that so many people still place Dungeon Master sooooo highly - 52 points so far, and that is 30 points above two giant games that are newer, far more in depth with better graphics, humour (in SOMI at least) and sound effects, more fiendish puzzles (in SOMI, again) and more strategy (in Civilisation's case). Maybe this shows that some adventurers are stuck in a rut, but maybe they really do play this game once a month to see how many ways they can kill Lord Chaos. Oh well, that's life. Keep up the good work, Sue, and keep the variety in the mag - we all need it (and my K score would be significantly less if you didn't!). @~Cheers, J! - o -